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AI in your practice
Where AI earns its place in a medical, dental or veterinary practice today, what to demand from any vendor, and how to tell whether it is working. Plain guides, real numbers, no hype.
By Sohel Siddique, who builds Lydoh and VoiceboxMD · Updated November 4, 2026
Where we stand
Each one can be checked against your own practice, and each could turn out wrong. Here is why we hold them.
The safest first uses of AI in a practice are the jobs that eat staff time and carry little clinical risk: answering the phone, taking appointment and refill requests, sending reminders, and drafting notes that a clinician reads and signs. Diagnosis and treatment are where a wrong answer hurts a patient. Leave those to clinicians, and hold any AI that comes near them to far stronger evidence than a vendor demo. If a tool cannot show you how it does on an ordinary week of your own calls or charts, it is not ready for your patients.
An AI vendor that hears, reads or stores patient information for your practice is a business associate under HIPAA, and it signs a BAA before it touches a single call or chart. HHS's own list of business associate examples includes a third-party chatbot that handles medical reminders and appointment scheduling (HHS business associate guidance). If a vendor will not sign one, the answer is no, however good the demo. Our guide to HIPAA and answering services lists what the agreement has to say.
Every AI tool in a practice needs an easy way out to a human: a transfer to the front desk, a callback, the doctor on call for an urgent problem after hours. In the first month of our solo practice case study, a third of calls went to the front desk, on purpose. An AI that never hands off is not efficient; it is hiding the calls it should not take.
A vendor will report how many calls or notes its AI completed. Ask instead what it handed to your staff, whether staff could act on it, and what fell through. In the case study, staff marked 89% of the 843 requests the AI wrote up as handled; that is the number we watch. Watch the guardrails too: the worst day of that month was caused by a safety limit, not by the AI.
Our stake. We make Lydoh, an AI receptionist and answering service for practices, and VoiceboxMD, our sister product for AI clinical notes and dictation. Both sit in the "phones and paperwork" category we tell you to start with, so weigh our view with that in mind. Every guide in this series is written to be useful whether or not you ever buy from us.
General information, not legal or medical advice.
The series
Start with the case study for what AI on a practice phone line looks like in real numbers, then the guides for your own specialty.
Keep reading
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